DECADENT OR HEARTY?
KIPLING’S DILEMMA
By JAD ADAMS
[Jad Adams gave this paper to members in London on 11 April 2007. He is the author of
Kipling published by Haus books, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of
English, School of Advanced Study, University of London. An earlier version of this
paper was given at a University of Oxford “Fin-de-Siècle” seminar on 12 October
2006. – Ed.]
When Kipling settled in London in 1889 he had no obvious literary
homeland. His family background with the Pre-Raphaelites and his exotic
‘Indian Gothic’ writing suited him for the decadents. His relationship with
the soldiers and administrators of the Empire, however, made him more a
candidate for the hearties of the ‘Henley regatta’ meeting at Solferino’s
restaurant in Rupert Street.
Kipling’s working out of this dichotomy took place while he was
writing the novel The Light That Failed in which he grappled with the fin
de siècle themes of the artist in society, the New Woman, London life and,
perhaps unconsciously, homoeroticism.
This paper will use an analysis of The Light That Failed to look at
Kipling’s position in literary London, pointing up the similarities between
the supposedly antagonistic literary movements, both of which relied for
their raison d’être on their relationship to the British Empire.
I will first give some working definitions of what I mean by decadents
and hearties. Secondly I will talk about Kipling in relation to the decadents
and his work around 1890. Finally I will try to draw together the life and
the work in discussing the artistically unsuccessful but biographically
fascinating novel The Light That Failed.
The Hearties grouped around W.E. Henley, the editor of the National
Observer, often meeting at Solferinos restaurant in Rupert Street. Their
name accurately describes their demeanour: they were a masculine group
with members including such imperialists as G.A.Henty and H.Rider
Haggard. They were pragmatic, unselfconscious imperialists: the National
Observer announced itself ‘an imperial review’ on its masthead. They
were conservative in politics and women tended to be idealised, remote
figures. It was, in short, a man’s world
The Decadents are more difficult to define, except that they respected
the ideas, if not the person of Oscar Wilde (some who could be defined as
Decadents, notably Aubrey Beardsley, actively disliked Wilde and went
out of their way to avoid him). As a group (or a community of interests)
they met in the Café Royal or private homes: the home of Henry Harland,
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editor of the Yellow Book, at 144 Cromwell Road; the home of Aubrey and
Mabel Beardsley and their mother at 114 Cambridge Street; and at Mabel
Dearmer’s ‘lurid Mondays’ at 9 Davenport Street. The men were feminine
or feminised males if not actually homosexual, at home with the world of
women – Wilde himself edited Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889. The
women to be found in Decadent circles were ‘modern’, but supporting the
various notions of female emancipation current in the 1890s was not a
defining characteristic of Decadence, the point is that a New Women could
move among the Decadents and not feel out of place.
Artistically, the Hearties’ work was a response to the working out of
Britain’s imperial mission, while the Decadents tended to look to France
for artistic inspiration. For the Hearties art had a function in society, often a
moral function, for the Decadents the motto was art for art’s sake. To quote
the famous preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘There is no such thing
as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written,
that is all.’
In terms of artistic lineage, the Decadents grew from the aesthetes of
the 1880s who developed from the mid-century Pre-Raphaelites. By
background, Kipling was firmly in the Decadent camp: artists
predominated in his family, there were no soldiers (unlike the Decadent
Lionel Johnson who had three brothers serving in the colonies). His uncle
was the great Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones and the young Kipling
would spend school holidays with him. This was not merely a familial
obligation, when he was able to make his own choices about where to live,
Kipling took a house next door to Burne-Jones in Rottingdean. Another
uncle was Edward Poynter, later Sir Edward Poynter RA.
Kipling’s study at school was decorated to give a Pre-Raphaelite effect
with pictures, antiques and curios. One of Kipling’s official biographers,
Charles Carrington says, ‘He was a decadent. His friends, his teachers,
were liberals, his tastes were “aesthetic”, the writers he most admired were
the fashionable pessimists.’1 His head teacher Cormell Price was a junior
pre-Raphaelite, and friend of the family, and it was probably this family
connection that led to Kipling’s being sent to the United Services College
at Westward Ho! He was the school poet, not in any sense an athlete. One
of his schoolboy verses “Ave Imperatrix”, was imperialist in tone, but it
was an imitation of a poem by Oscar Wilde of the same title. Wilde was
always loyal to empire and Empress, he was still publicly celebrating
Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897 after he had served time at her Majesty’s
pleasure.
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LITTLE SUN-BAKED BOOKS
Kipling left school at sixteen and went to work as a reporter in India,
rejoining his family there. In India the four of them were called The
Family Square, of course a play on the British square, the supposedly
impregnable battle formation. His father was a junior pre-Raphaelite, a
ceramicist and museum curator. His mother was a poet as was his sister
Trix Fleming who was also a novelist and had two novels published.
Kipling was first to distinguish himself in writing stories about Indian
life in the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Week’s News in
Allahabad; and Kipling’s output of stories preceded his appearance in
London. Plain Tales from the Hills had been published in England in
January 1888 and the Indian Railway Library booklets were also
circulated in paper covers, probably from plates sent directly from India as
the British versions show the Indian price – one rupee – with the local
price of a shilling added across the top. These had given Kipling a
reputation among the literary set; Andrew Lang remarked: ‘The books had
the strangeness, the colour, the variety, the perfume of the East.’ 2
SOLDIERS THREE: the (literally paper-back) first Indian Railway Library
book to be published in Britain (Author’s collection).
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Anjali Arondeker points out how boring and provincial India was
thought to be before Kipling.3 Now the East was exotic, it had the flavour
of strange delights beloved of the decadents. Dixon Scott looking back on
the period in the Bookman in 1912 writes of ‘A delicious insolence of
aesthetics’ in Kipling’s work ‘The little sun-baked books from Allahabad
seemed if anything more golden than the Yellow Book. The proof of the
literary epicure was his palate for the Kipling liqueur….The youngster was
bracketed with Beardsley, was bracketed with Max. Mr John Lane began
to collect his first editions. Mr Richard Le Gallienne was told off to
Bodley Head him.’4
The stories reveal an artist who knows his decadent city, such places as
“The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” where opium is smoked, people like
the Hindu widow ‘fairer than bar-gold in the mint…an endless delight…as
ignorant as a bird’5. In a style that was to be called Indian Gothic undead
natives met their imperial masters on equal terms in a pit for cholera
victims6. Kipling described scenes such as that in the house of a magician:
‘In the centre of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass
basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the centre like a night-light.
Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times.’7 Such
an image would not look out of place in the work of Aleister Crowley
whose first book, White Stains, was published by the Decadents’ publisher
Leonard Smithers.
This is an underground world of the east: of prostitution, opium,
murder, inter-racial sex and the occult. Kipling had more in common with
his London contemporaries than was obvious to his later critics who
wanted to see him as a counter-point to effete aesthetes. Wilde famously
‘feasted with panthers’, the renters and blackmailers of London’s sexual
underworld just as, to the disgust of his colleagues at the club, Kipling
used to trawl the night-life of the Old City of Lahore to gain his own
detailed knowledge of opium dens and brothels. .
Kipling arrived in London at the end of 1889, he lived above a sausage
and mash shop in Villiers Street, off the Strand, a few paces from Trafalgar
Square. Gatti’s music hall was opposite the sausage shop, it was such a
part of his life that he mentions being able to just see on to the stage by
looking through his window and a skylight of Gatti’s. Kipling used to
listen to the cab-men and the music hall girls shouting outside in the street
and he sat for hours in Gatti’s listening to the talk of soldiers which he
wove into the verses of Barrack-Room Ballads. He must have rubbed
shoulders with Arthur Symons, the leading decadent, music hall
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correspondent of the Star, who famously wrote in London Nights, his life
is ‘like a music hall.’8
Kipling made a deal with Macmillan’s to take his writing in return for
a retainer and his stories and poems began to appear at regular intervals,
including “The Courting of Dinah Shadd”, “On Greenhow Hill” and
“Without Benefit of Clergy”, all of them tales of damaged or distorted
love, and clearly part of Kipling’s working out of the pain and confusion
caused by his disastrous love life.
W.E. Henley in the National Observer became the first to publish the
colloquial soldier-speak poems of Barrack-Room Ballads, starting with
“Danny Deever” in February 1890 when such vigorous verse was alien to
Victorian sensibilities. In tone, form and subject matter it has strong
similarities to Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” of the end of the
decade: both are first person witness ballads about the execution of
soldiers.
Over this year, 1890, Kipling was to supply Henley with some of his
most unforgettable verses which show deep sympathy for the common
soldier, but are also full of respect for native people: “Gunga Din” who
was a better man, “ ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’ ” who broke a British square. Poems
from this period are thought of as a tub-thumping Imperialism, in fact
many are about loss and longing – and some are about sex, such as
“Mandalay” of 1890. It contains the refrain
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!
The poem was written to a waltz tune which is one reason for its high
musicality; it became a music hall favourite. The events that led to a
British soldier’s being stationed in Burma, not hinted at in the poem, were
that the Burmese King Thibaw confiscated the British Bombay-Burma
company and the British therefore invaded Burma in 1885, deposed the
King and occupied the country.
The soldier thinks of a lost love:
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
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He remembers how
With ’er arm upon my shoulder an’ ’er cheek agin my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.
This is a love poem then, not only for this Burmese girl but for the East
itself
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a
thirst;
By contrast England is colourless and restrained. The speaker hates
England, its weather, its scenery, the narrow religiosity of its temperance
campaigners, the limited horizons of his own class of people
I am sick o’ wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ’ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face and grubby ’and—
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
With this rejection of England and Englishness for a better world in the
East, one thinks of Tennyson’s exactly opposite sentiments, in Locksley
Hall, ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,’ a narrator who
is disgusted at the thought of being ‘mated with a squalid savage.’
Tennyson’s characters (one thinks also of the narrator of ‘Maud’) are
genuine imperialists, willing to sail abroad to die for their country;
Kipling’s soldier doesn’t want to die for his country, he wants to get out of
it and live with a lovely girl in the East. This celebration of miscegenation
could easily be written by one of the Decadent circle: in Arthur Symons’s
London Nights or John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues, though Kipling
is a better writer than both of those, and the leading Decadent Richard Le
Gallienne spoke highly of it.9
I don’t know of any of the Decadents who specifically repudiate the
empire or wrote work as anti-imperialist as, say, the Hearty
R.L.Stevenson’s The Ebb Tide or The Beach of Falesa. The Decadents did
not disparage the empire, they felt themselves to be the culmination of
imperial ambition, a period of luxurious surfeit at the height of empire
after which decline was inevitable: a recurring theme in Kipling’s more
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thoughtful pieces. The classic ambiguous tale of empire is, one that first
saw the light in the Indian Railway Library series, The Man Who Would be
King, a depiction of the bluff, trickery and ultimately self-destructive
hubris of empire.
Oscar Wilde was still, in 1890, a friend of Henley, and welcome at
Henley’s gatherings at his home at 1 Merton Place, Chiswick, but literary
life was increasingly polarised and as the nineties progressed, the Hearties
or ‘Henley’s Regatta’ came to be the literary coterie in which Kipling
found company. Kipling had entered a very male group devoted to the
depiction of real or idealised male experiences, in which women were
remote figures of romance.
The literary world of London seemed wide open to Kipling but he
chose his friends carefully, gravitating towards the conservative and the
established rather than the avant garde. He wrote a skit which included the
lines,
But I consort with long-haired things
In velvet collar-rolls,
Who talk about the Aims of Art,
And “theories” and “goals,”
And moo and coo with women-folk
About their blessed souls.10
Clearly Kipling had the contempt for theory of the self-made man, and
the fondness of the Decadents for theories of aesthetics repelled him – as
did their eliding the differences between the genders (being long-haired
men who talk of their innermost selves with women). It is interesting to
consider what Kipling’s life would have been had he been to university as
his cousin Stanley Baldwin did, instead of going to work at sixteen. He
wrote ruefully of his cousin, ‘I’d give something to be in the Sixth at
Harrow as he is, with a university education to follow.’11
Even Henley did not escape Kipling’s scorn, he resisted Henley’s
referring to him as ‘one of my young men’ and said to Trix, ‘Henley is a
great man; he is also a cripple, but he is not going to come the bullying
cripple over me’ 12 There was a genuine affection between them, however,
in a spirit of hearty camaraderie Kipling gave Henley a punch ball on
which were written the names of all the people Henley disliked: Robertson
Nicholl, W.T. Stead, Samuel Crockett, Richard Le Gallienne and others,
‘and these gave zest to his morning exercise.’13
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Henley himself was hardly an unequivocal Hearty. His work was
sufficiently modern and French-influenced for Arthur Symons to include
him in his essay The Decadent Movement in Literature but when it was
written up as a book, the mood had changed and (after having been
previously advertised under the earlier title) it was called The Symbolist
Movement in Literature and Henley was omitted.
Another direct contact with the Decadent world is that Kipling knew
Beardsley who of course had been introduced to the London art world by
Kipling’s uncle Burne-Jones. He supported Beardsley, intervening when
he was sacked as art editor of The Yellow Book in the wake of the Oscar
Wilde scandal. 14
Kipling’s own pen and ink pictures are suggestive of Beardsley, which
is hardly surprising given the Pre-Raphaelite influences on them both,
particularly of early Beardsley before he developed the flamboyant style of
his maturity (if one can speak of the maturity of an artist who died at
twenty-five). The only book Kipling illustrated himself were the Just So
Stories of 1902, the pictures of which make an interesting comparison with
Beardsley’s. Kipling’s pictures show both grotesques and isolated people
or creatures, giving something of a clue to how he was feeling after the
death of his daughter Josephine to whom he had told the stories which he
had now written out and was illustrating. One can compare the execution
of Kipling’s “The Crab that Played with the Sea” with Beardsley’s cat
drawing for Poe’s Tales of 1893; the character Parsee Pestonjee Bomonjee
and Beardsley’s picture of his printer Joseph Pennell as a Notre Dame
gargoyle; Beardsley’s ape from the Murder in the Rue Morgue and
Kipling’s “Animal that came out of the sea and ate up all the food”; the
composition of Kipling’s “The Man and his Little Girl-Daughter” with
Beardsley’s “Cambridge ABC” for an undergraduate magazine.
Richard Le Gallienne, one of the chroniclers of the 1890s and a leading
Decadent, who as noted above had been sent to ‘Bodley Head’ Kipling,
did so in a critical work published to cash in on Kipling’s fame. He called
Kipling one of ‘the true end-of-the-century decadents,’ whose aim was ‘to
begin the twentieth century by throwing behind them all that the
nineteenth century has so painfully won’ by which he meant ‘democracy,
the woman-movement [and] the education of the masses.’ 15
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THE NOVEL THAT FAILED
‘It is unnecessary to dwell on The Light That Failed,’ writes Kipling’s first
official biographer, Lord Birkenhead.16 I disagree and have dwelt long on
it.
The emotional inspiration for the book was Kipling’s love for Flo
Garrard. The unobtainable beloved is very much an 1890s theme.
Kipling’s longing for Flo as an unobtainable love is not so different from
the same sentiments in such Rhymers as Ernest Dowson with his adored
“Missie”; W.B.Yeats for Maud Gonne and Arthur Symons for the dancer
Lydia. This was not the courtly love of the Middle Ages where the object
of devotion was unobtainable because she was already married or her
social situation was such that marriage could not take place; in the case of
Flo and the other 1890s women they were available and could love the
men who adored them, they simply didn’t. To use the vernacular, the girls
just didn’t fancy them.
Few English writers had become famous through writing short stories
and none had scaled great heights. Literary London was watching Kipling
to see if he would produce a great novel, and Kipling himself had long
been aware that he should be writing a long work to pull his talents
together. Fortunately he was commissioned to write a novel by the agent
for Lippincott’s Magazine.
Lippincott’s showed exceptional dexterity in selecting new writers. The
twelve issues of the 1890 magazine features Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock
Holmes story “The Sign of Four”; Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray,
and, at the end of the year, the start of The Light that Failed. It was
Henley’s printing of a negative review of Dorian Gray that led to the split
between him and Wilde, remarking that the book was suited for ‘none but
outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.’17 Previously Wilde and
he had been friends, this is the point at which camp followers have to take
sides. The Light That Failed is by way of Kipling’s working out of the
issues involved in the struggle.
Kipling laboured under the internal pressure of his professional need to
produce a long work against a deadline, and under the emotional charge
resulting from the way in which a book of some autobiographical
complexity was being written while the story it reflected was being played
out in his life. The spark that lit The Light That Failed was the
reappearance in Kipling’s life of Flo Garrard.
Kipling and Trix had been boarded in England from a young age. This
was not exceptional – Vyvyen Brendan’s Children of the Raj of 2005
describes how most English children in India were sent away either to
England or to boarding schools within India, so they did not acquire native
manners as they grew up. Another boarder, after Kipling had left, was Flo,
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a friend of his sister. Kipling used to visit and fell in love with her when he
was fourteen. He believed they were engaged when he left England for
India in 1882. A year or so later she broke off the relationship. Kipling’s
sister wrote of Flo ‘She refused him more than once – his love took a deal
of killing – and I think she half accepted him, or he thought she did.’ 18
As Kipling tells the story in the novel, on some lonely wandering in the
London fog on the embankment of the Thames in late he met his love
again. As he described it:
There was no mistaking. The years had turned the child to a woman,
but they had not altered the dark-grey eyes, the thin scarlet lips, or the
firmly-modelled mouth and chin; and, that all should be as it was of
old, she wore a closely fitting grey dress.19
This was almost certainly not how it happened that the two met again in
January or early February 1890. We know he had begged his cousin
Margaret Burne-Jones to enquire about Flo at the Slade School of Art, ‘I
want to know how she is and what she is doing. . . I want you as quietly
and unobtrusively as possible to learn all you can about this girl.’20
Doubtless when he got back to England he made further enquiries about
her current whereabouts and contrived to see her. In present day terms: he
had been stalking her.
In this account I will first say what actually happened to Kipling and
then refer to the fictionalisation of the events in the novel where Kipling
and Flo appear as Dick and Maisie. When Kipling met Flo again, both in
their twenties, she had finished at the Slade School and was due to study
further at the Académie Julian in Paris. In the novel the Flo character
Maisie’s half-hearted acceptance of Kipling (in the character of Dick)
extends to permitting him to visit her on Sunday afternoons and seeking
his advice on her work, and this us probably a reasonable representation of
their actual relationship. Trix said Flo was ‘naturally cold – her very face
and magnolia-petal complexion showed that - and she wanted to live her
own life and paint her very ineffective little pictures.’ 21
This is certainly the impression Maisie gives to Dick in the novel, for
she shows considerable self-knowledge, when she thinks of herself as
being selfish because she is using Dick’s skills while she is unable to give
him the love he craves in return. Dick is completely unable to conceive
‘that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since he loved her.’
22
Kipling visited Flo at her house in London where she was living with
Mabel Price, three years older than her and the daughter of an Oxford
Mathematics don. Mabel had studied at the Slade and later in London
before going to the Académie Julian with Flo.
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Flo’s indifference to him, her resistance to the display of his abilities,
probed a deep wound of loneliness and rejection in Kipling. His parents
had abandoned him in the House of Desolation with no justification that
was comprehensible to him; now he could not make the girl he loved, love
him back. Kipling, irresistibly drawn back to past failures, tried again. As
he wrote:
That the Dog returns to his vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the
fire;23
Again, Trix remarked that she did not think that Flo ‘did anything to
kill his love; she was simply not attracted by anything he had to offer.’24
Flo was not even particularly interested in the written word – Trix said
even her letter writing was poor. Kipling could be one of the best writers in
the world, destined to be the first Englishman to won the Nobel Prize, but
if his beloved was not moved by literature, that counted for little.
Kipling visited Flo in Paris from 24-28 May 1890, where she
was living with Mabel Price in the Avenue de Jena. Little is known about
this time except that they went to the countryside to sketch and to picnic
with friends. Kipling must have manoeuvred the time to allow him some
private moments of conversation with Flo for he was never to see her
again, and clearly something had transpired between them that ended the
relationship and sent Kipling off in the heat of furious creativity.
If she had not found it before, Flo had by now definitely discovered
her sexual orientation. It is not known whether she told Kipling she was a
lesbian; or he worked it out for himself on seeing her intimacy with
Mabel; or perhaps never did understand explicitly, except that she rejected
his advances and gave him no hope for the future.
Soon after his return he wrote, The Light That Failed with a theme
drawn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh but with strongly
biographical elements.
The book begins with Maisie and Dick, recognisably Kipling and Flo,
on a seashore playing with a revolver. They are children companions in
bondage boarding in a place familiar as the one where Kipling, his sister
and Flo lived. The game on the beach ends in Maisie accidentally
discharging the revolver near Dick’s face, an event which is probably the
ultimate cause of his later blindness (though other causes are given when it
is diagnosed). In the same place, Maisie is talking about her imminent
departure from the boarding house and Dick declares his feelings for her
and coaxes a kiss for the first time.
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Dick is then seen as a young man in the Sudan campaign, in the
camaraderie of masculine company. He is a war artist, demonstrating the
possibility of being both creative and a man of action and full of ‘the
austere love that springs up between men who have tugged the same oar
together’.25
The slaughter of Gordon and the loss of the Sudan to what were
considered savages was a burning political issue which was to continue
through most of the decade: Kitchener was not ordered to begin the
reconquest of the Sudan, a key element of Kipling’s plot, until 1896, six
years after the first publication of The Light That Failed, though
expeditionary skirmishes on the Sudanese border continued throughout.
Dick goes to London where his pictures are attracting attention, and he
suffers on a diet of sausage and mash. He meets Maisie in the fog on the
Embankment and against his will, ‘every pulse of Dick’s body throbbed
furiously and his palate dried in his mouth’.26 He walks beside her and
they have a desultory conversation. She has also become an artist,
studying in London and France. Kipling made them both artists so as to
bridge in his characters some of the distance between himself and Flo,
who had so little in common artistically.
Dick sees her again and takes her to a print shop where people are
admiring his work in the window and the fiercely ambitious Maisie envies
his fame. Maisie’s is a tale of ‘patient toil backed by savage pride’ where
she struggles on with no success. He declares love but she is dedicated to
her work and wants only his advice.
In The Light That Failed Maisie is living with a ‘red haired girl’ who is
not named and whose relationship with Maisie is indistinct except that she
has power over her and seems to despise Dick. She is furious, for example,
when Maisie permits Dick a chaste kiss when the two women go off
together to France.
While Maisie is out of the picture with the red-haired girl a messy subplot takes over: Dick’s friend (really the other love interest) Torpenhow
becomes entangled with a prostitute, Bessie, who he helps when he finds
her collapsed with hunger. Dick earns her enmity by sending Torpenhow
away when she is about to move in with him – suggesting that male
friendship is more important than sex with women. Dick finds he is losing
his sight and he uses Bessie as a model for his last great picture, of
Melancholia, the subject Maisie said she was going off to France to paint.
Under the pretext of cleaning up, Bessie destroys the masterpiece. Dick
has gone blind and Torpenhow, out of pity for his disabled friend, does not
enlighten him.
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In a scene of male intimacy,
Torpenhow thrust out a large and hairy paw from the long chair.
Dick clutched it tightly, and in half an hour had fallen asleep.
Torpenhow withdrew his hand and, stooping over Dick, kissed him
lightly on the forehead, as men do sometimes kiss a wounded
comrade in the hour of death, to ease his departure.27
Torpenhow goes to France and brings Maisie to Dick but after seeing him
blindly displaying his ruined picture she runs out. Maisie is last seen alone
in her house in London, ashamed of herself for her treatment of Dick but
unable to change; neither a great painter nor a great lover and therefore a
failure both as an artist and a woman.
Torpenhow and others go off to join in the reconquest of the Sudan,
leaving Dick alone in his rooms. While out walking with his landlord,
Dick encounters Bessie and she returns to his rooms and soon tells him
that she ruined his picture. He determines on a last great gesture. He
travels to Egypt and reacquaints himself with the terrain and the army,
being shot dead at last as he reaches his beloved friend Torpenhow.
The strain of creation under such emotional burdens as Kipling faced
saw him overload the plot with implausibilities which show Kipling
shrinking in the face of what he had created. He is simply unable to face
Maisie’s (and therefore Flo’s) lesbian relationship, and therefore has the
red-haired girl confessing love for Dick. Mabel Price made a point of
telling Kipling’s official biographer that no such thing had happened, so
clearly did she see herself in the picture of the red-haired girl.
Kipling wants the love between men to be noble, pure and untainted by
sex with women so the reader is expected to believe Torpenhow would
rather leave the country at Dick’s bidding than have sex with a willing girl.
Finally, there is no way such a noble man as Dick would appear on the
battlefield in an enfeebled state which would endanger his comrades by
obliging them to care for him.
On the other hand, the figure of the heroic, but wounded imperialist
riding literally blindly into another desert adventure where he will
certainly die is one which could only have been created by Kipling, the
great poet of empire. Dick’s life and fatal last ride is also a metaphor for
the failing gallantry of nineteenth century man confronting the new
woman which makes it a richer and more interesting story than many
contemporaries realised.
The man-loving and misogynistic nature of the book was not lost on
contemporary writers. Max Beerbohm slyly remarks that with its adoration
of military men, if we knew only this work of Kipling’s, we should assure
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it was the pen-name of a woman writer, ‘strange that these heroes with
their self-conscious blurting of oaths and slang, their cheap cynicism about
the female sex, were not fondly created out of the inner consciousness of a
female novelist.’ 28
Kipling had wrought his experiences into art: his terror of
blindness (a genuine and realistic fear for him given his history of poor
sight); but it is also an age-old symbol of sexual impotence: masturbation
will make you blind and the evil eye will make you impotent; when
Oedipus commits a sexual transgression he does not cut off the offending
member but puts out his eyes. Dick’s blindness is therefore a symbol both
of his loss of creative power as a visual artist and the surrender of the male
force to female will.
The light is the light of his eyes but also the light of female love which
is betrayed when Flo and Maisie take up a man’s instruments: the smoking
gun and the smoking cigarette are both masculine symbols which a
woman can hold but in Kipling’s ideal world, should not. Tobacco is taken
as a symbol of male bonding: ‘Have you any tobacco’? being an effective
password to male intimacy. Dick goes
whistling to his chambers with a strong yearning for some man-talk
and tobacco after his first experience of an entire day spent in the
society of a woman.29
Maisie is recognisably a type who recurs in English novels of the 1890s.
Her obvious precursor was in Kipling’s friend Rider Haggard’s adventure
She (1887). Kipling’s work was to be followed by many others but notably
by Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894, which incidentally features Kipling’s uncle
Edward Poynter as one of its bohemian characters), Grant Allen’s The
Woman Who Did (1895), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895),
all with the same maddening, self-directed desirable yet distant modern
woman.
Flo Garrard continued to live with women and paint pictures, and on
the flyleaf of her copy of the book, she wrote
If you happen to read this singular, if somewhat murky little story you
are very likely to rather wonder if real people could be quite so stupid
and objectionable as this crowd. . . Of course its difficult to see
oneself as others see you, still m’thinks there’s something somewhat
distorted about it all; and that the story does not run its entire length
on lines quite parallel with Truth.30
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She signed herself Maisie. She died a moderately successful artist of 73,
having had exhibitions in London and Paris.
The pressure of this doomed relationship combined with his routine of
work and his intense loneliness to send Kipling into a nervous breakdown.
While Kipling was publishing The Light That Failed in different editions
he was having a close relationship with Wolcott Balestier, with whom he
wrote The Naulahka, a working out of the relationship of the New Woman
with a heroic man which ends with surrender in the man’s favour. Balestier
died suddenly, and Kipling pretty much immediately proposed to his sister
Carrie, they were married shortly after and settled in the U.S.A.
His novel is the only lengthy clue to what was happening to Kipling:
the way Dick was feeling like a limp-wristed Decadent but acting like a
muscular Hearty is a biographical pointer to the dichotomy Kipling was
experiencing in London in the 1890s.
Gail Ching-Laing Low remarks in White Skins/Black Masks of how
‘this feminised decadent world of death, pain, hedonism, sensual pleasure
and sexual revelry is rejected for the alternative healthier and cleaner,
military world of male camaraderie.’31
Yet the world of male camaraderie cannot fully displace the woman’s
world, the heterosexual world, of decadence. The Light that Failed
describes Kipling’s unresolved feelings for women and unresolvable
feelings for men – they are unresolvable because the corollary is
homosexuality which is unacceptable; love between men must remain
pure from the taint of sex.
It is in this book that Kipling unequivocally aligns himself as an artist
with the hearty and the imperial adventure – but it is an artist who is
emasculated and whose art is damaged who goes out to fight.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Carrington, Charles, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, (London: Macmillan
1955) p.74.
Andrew Laing, from Essays in Little (1891) reprinted in Green, Robert Lancelyn
(ed.) Kipling: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge 1971) p.73.
Arondeker, Anjali, “Lingering Pleasures, Perverted Texts: Colonial Desire in
Kipling’s Anglo-India”. In Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexuality in Colonial
Literature, ( Minneapolis Minn: University of Minnesota Press 2003).
Dixon Scott in the Bookman Vol. LIII, pp.143-6. Reprinted in Green, op.cit. p.310.
Rudyard Kipling, “Beyond the Pale”, Plain Tales from the Hills, (London:
Macmillan 1890).
Rudyard Kipling, “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”, Wee Willie Winkie and
Other Stories, (London: Macmillan 1895).
Rudyard Kipling, “The House of Suddhoo”, Plain Tales from the Hills, (London:
Macmillan 1890).
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
Arthur Symons, London Nights, (London: Bodley Head 1895) from “Prologue: In
the Stall”.
Richard Le Gallienne, Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism, (London: John Lane, The
Bodley Head 1900) pp.31-2, 162.
Rudyard Kipling, “In Partibus”, Civil and Military Gazette, 23 December 1889.
Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.1 (London: Palgrave
Macmillan 1990) p.80.
Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, (London: Weidenfeld 1978) p.109.
Kennedy Williamson, W.E. Henley: A Memoir, (London: Harold Shaylor 1930)
p.276.
Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, (London: Harper Collins 1998)
p.239.
Richard Le Gallienne, op. cit. pp.158, 161.
Lord Birkenhead, op.cit. p.124. On the previous page he refers to it as ‘The only
rotten apple in [Kipling’s] teeming orchard’.
Anonymous review in Scots Observer, 5 July 1890.
Trix Fleming, Kipling Papers, Kipling Archive, University of Sussex 32/32.
Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, (London: Macmillan 1891). Hereafter:
TLTF.
Thomas Pinney, op.cit. p.111.
Ibid.
TLTF pp.70.
Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919).
Ibid.
TLTF p.74.
TLTF p.57.
TLTF p.191.
Quoted in Carrington, op.cit. p.217
TLTF p.121.
Harry Rickets, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling, (London:
Chatto and Windus 1999) p.167.
Gail Ching-Laing Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and
Colonialism, (London: Routledge 1996) p.170.
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